Russia knocked out most infrastructure in Ukraine’s Pokrovsk, local official says

KYIV (Reuters) – Russia knocked out around 80% of critical infrastructure in the town of Pokrovsk, a key logistics hub in Ukraine’s east, as Moscow’s troops inched forward, a local official said on Friday.

Serhiy Dobriak, Pokrovsk’s military administration head, said Russian forces were at about 7 km (4 miles) from the town, which is at an intersection of roads and a railway that makes it an important logistics point for the military and for civilians in the eastern Donetsk region.

Russia forces have focused some of their heaviest assaults in recent weeks on Pokrovsk, which could allow it to consolidate and advance the front line in the region.

“The enemy is leaving us without power, without water, without gas. Prepares us for the winter, so to say,” Dobriak said on national television.

Some 13,050 residents remain in the town and Ukrainian officials are pressing on with an evacuation plan that has been going on for some weeks. Just a month and a half ago, the town hosted more than 48,000 people, he said.

Russia continued to pummel the town on Thursday, launching a total of nine glide bombs and injuring four people in two attacks which damaged infrastructure, Dobriak said.

He said the daily attacks targeted energy facilities and other vital infrastructure. Almost half of Pokrovsk, 10 nearby villages and one smaller town were without power, he said, adding the energy infrastructure was “almost impossible to repair”.

He put the level of the destruction at about four fifths of the town’s critical infrastructure.

Russia denies targeting civilian infrastructure.

More than 31 months since Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukrainian forces are on the defensive and Kyiv ordered the pullout of its troops from Vuhledar, another town in the east. Kyiv’s top commander this week ordered defences strengthened on the eastern front.

In a Friday morning report on the battlefield situation, Ukraine’s military said that its forces repelled 30 attacks on the Pokrovsk front over the past day as Russia pushed towards the villages of Mykolaivka and Selydove.

(Reporting by Anastasiia Malenko; Editing by Alison Williams)